Offering to the Gods
by drekadair
Summary: After the Fall, John helps Mrs. Hudson pack up 221b, and takes a moment to mourn his friend.


**Author's Note**: I spotted A Perplexing Puzzle's fanart of John smoking on Tumblr, and it inspired to to write this. The story doesn't really have anything to do with the picture, but I started wondering what would cause John to smoke... and then this happened. You can check out the piece at (dot com) (slash) post (slash) 53971268538 (slash) and-if-youre-still-breathing-youre-the-lucky

**Disclaimer**: The usual: I don't own these lovely characters, I'm just borrowing them for a little afternoon angst.

* * *

**Offerings to the Gods**

The weather had been better yesterday, but sometime during the night a thick layer of clouds had settled over the city like a suffocating lid, replacing blue skies with gray monotony: June in London. John wasn't sure how he felt about the change in weather. The warmth and sunshine reminded him, in a distant way, of the baking heat of Afghanistan, which should have been unpleasant but was somehow just the opposite. The gloom seemed more appropriate for his return to Baker Street—but not appropriate enough. As John climbed out of the taxi, he found himself wishing for a noisy, miserable rainstorm, or even the smothering silence of snowfall: something stronger than just gray skies, something that resembled the knot of bleak emotion lodged beneath his sternum.

He paid the cabbie and trudged up the stairs, a familiar ritual turned bitter by the knowledge that Sherlock was not waiting there, would never wait there again. Halfway up the stairs he heard a noise from the flat and paused, his hand on the railing, waiting for the instinctive surge of hope to die again. But he waited, and the hope never came, only a sort of pain caused by remembering all the other times he had climbed these stairs and heard noises above him. Then, it had been Sherlock. Now, it was only Mrs. Hudson.

John had known he would have to come back to the flat eventually. Most of his things were here, and it was unfair to expect Mrs. Hudson to pack up all of Sherlock's possessions by herself. When she called to tell John she'd bought boxes from the moving company he'd agreed to come and help her.

She was waiting for him in the flat, looking helplessly at the piles and heaps of Sherlock's papers and equipment. When John came through the door she gave him a sad, harried smile.

"How have you been, love?" she asked, and hugged him.

"Fine," John lied. "I've been fine. You?"

"Oh, you know." She fluttered her hands in a way that was meant to be reassuring and dismissive. The gesture reminded John of the sparrows that sometimes got trapped inside malls: lost and frightened.

There didn't seem any point in more small talk. They turned to the piles and the heaps and tried to make the physical accumulations of Sherlock's life fit into a dozen cardboard boxes held together with packing tape, the same way they had succeeded in making the physical manifestation of his life fit into a wooden box buried beneath six feet of earth.

The afternoon wore on with very little talking. By mutual, unspoken consent, neither of them touched the battered violin case propped beneath the window. Each item John handled seemed to carry some memory or emotion with it, so that he seemed to be not so much peeling away the layers of Sherlock's possessions from the flat as stripping off layers of his own self, until he felt raw and exposed.

He paused for a minute to give his nerves a chance to recover. Mrs. Hudson was working on the other side of the lounge, and he saw her go still as she lifted a stack of papers to reveal what was underneath. She stared at it, unmoving, and then said in a strained voice, "Are you hungry, John? I'll go downstairs and see if I can find something for lunch."

She replaced the papers and left without looking at him or waiting for a reply. John knew it was just an excuse to have some privacy for a good cry, but he didn't call her on it. He longed to have a good cry himself, but the emotion was balled up somewhere inside his ribcage and he didn't know how to let it out.

He shifted the stack of papers to see what had upset her, and his breath caught in his throat. Underneath was a coffee mug, the one John had bought Sherlock for last Christmas: a plain white mug with a diagram of a caffeine molecule on the side. It was still half-full of coffee, as though Sherlock had set it down and would return to finish it at any moment. Without thinking, John picked up the mug. The ceramic was cool to the touch, the coffee cold for weeks now. Sherlock would never drink this coffee.

The pain filled John's chest and threatened to block his throat. He forced himself to breathe deeply and steadily, the way Ella had coached him: in through the nose, out through the mouth. _In through the nose, out through mouth_. He wanted to cover up the mug again, as Mrs. Hudson had done, as though by concealing the permanency of Sherlock's absence he could make it less real, as though denial could shape reality.

He strode into the kitchen and tipped the cold coffee down the drain.

It wasn't that he didn't know how to let the emotion out, he thought. It was that he didn't know how to let it out safely. There was so much of it that he was afraid it would break something as it left his body, that once he loosened his control he would lose it entirely and never get it back.

Since he was in the kitchen, he grabbed one of the boxes and started pulling dishes out of the cupboards. There weren't many, because he and Sherlock ate take-away more often than they cooked, but they did have a large collection of teacups and mugs—too large, really, since they only used two or three out of the dozen that were kept, stacked upside-down and two high, in the cupboard next to the sink.

Under the least-used of them, wedged in the back corner and dusty with disuse, John found a packet of cigarettes: Sherlock's emergency cigarettes, which John had re-hidden after the Baskerville case and then forgotten about. He turned the box over in his hand, seeing Sherlock's long, pale fingers on the cardboard instead of his own brown, blunt ones. He opened the top, and the smell of tobacco summoned a wave of memories so strong they overwhelmed the gray reality of the kitchen with _Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock_.

He'd never been much of a smoker. In the army he'd smoked occasionally to be sociable, but had never developed a habit. Now he went to the window above Sherlock's violin case and threw it open, letting the noise of the street below come in on a gust of relatively fresh air. A little rummaging in a nearby box produced a lighter, and John extracted one of the cigarettes from the packet and lit it.

Smooth smoke curled around him and inside him. This was the good stuff, not the cheap brand most of his army mates bought. He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose and let the taste and smell remind him of—

_long days between cases, when Sherlock complained of boredom and John clung to his patience, hoping (a little guiltily) for a murder, not just for Sherlock's entertainment but for his own as well—_

_desperate moments when the case seemed to dead-end, and John feared the victim would go unavenged, while Sherlock feared his prey would escape him—_

_walking back to the flat after a celebratory post-case meal, Sherlock lighting up a cigarette and John chiding him gently and Sherlock scoffing at his concern, and everything seeming right and perfect and John feeling actually happy in a way he couldn't remember feeling in years—_

_In through the mouth, out through the nose_. Tears burned his eyes and he gave up fighting them. The pain rushed up from his chest, through his throat and out his tear ducts. He wept for what he'd had but had lost, and for what he'd wanted but now could never had, and he dragged on Sherlock's cigarette between ragged sobs like he was breathing for two.

John remembered hearing once that ancient peoples believed the gods received their prayers on plumes of smoke, so they burned incense and sacrifices, that the gods might hear them. John blew out a double lungful of tobacco smoke and watched it drift away through the open window. It rose up through the air, gray smoke invisible against the gray London sky, carrying John's plea:

_Just one more miracle._


End file.
